Teaching Philosophy and Materials
McCullers, "A Court in the West Eighties"
Carson McCullers's short story "A Court in the West Eighties" is a meditation on the life and development of another young woman, the story's nameless narrator. She is an eighteen-ear-old who is living in New York City in the 1930s and studies with great care the lives of those who live in the apartments that also look out onto her apartment building's "court." I drew a diagram of this court on the board in class, which you can see on our Tumblr photo for this day. This story differed from the two novels we read so far in that the character development in it is much more compressed, obviously, and we know details that are "supportable" only about one character, the narrator. Her impressions of the others who she sees through their windows are the only bits of information we know about those people and we can speculate as to the narrator's reliability. I drew a series of arrows on the board, indicating a kind of (chronological) progression from Edna to McCullers's narrator, to Estrella in Viramontes's novel. We wondered about how "emancipation" happens and where McCullers's narrator fits into all of the "questing" we've seen other American women working through in the previous texts of the course.
Some of you noted that McCullers's young woman seems insecure, populating her life with her own impressions of other people or co-opted information from other people's ambitions (such as the books that she buys to send to her male friend back home but reads for herself first). This could also just be intellectual curiosity or ambition, both laudable, most would say. We noted also that McCullers's story is, though not as overtly, a story concerned with a woman's development (the narrator is in the city to be educated), with borders (the distinctions that reverberate in McCullers's work between North and South), and with other kinds of borders . . . such as the physical ones that separate her from her neighbors in the apartment building, such as the "age" ones that make it hard for an eighteen-year-old woman to get a job in New York City, as she says, and the class borders on which the narrator comments upon her realization that her married neighbors are becoming increasingly "poor" even though their building is not a building occupied by poor people and it does not look shabby at all from the outside. This young narrator is learning a lot about the transgression of borders and the maintenance of them in this story, even though she doesn't comment on this directly.
We also see that the young narrator is developing ideas- or merely articulating preconceived notions- about femininity. We know her situation in New York City is somewhat unique, as a young woman far away from home in the city alone for her studies, and we know that she perceives the young married couple as very much in love and "happy," in the early pages of her story. She thus reinforces the traditional trajectory for a woman's life: marriage and then child-rearing. These she equates with "happiness." The other female she observes, the cellist, is characterized much less generously in the story. She sees male visitors in her apartment, she plays her cello bare-legged, legs apart, facing the window towards the court, and she unabashedly (and literally) airs her "dirty laundry" in her window - although, her laundry really is sort of "clean," or she's made a half-hearted effort, in the narrator's estimation, to clean it. So, the narrator presents a tableau of two possibilities for women: the role of woman as wife-and-mother, which ends sadly and in poverty as far as we can tell, and the role of the artist, a role that is characterized as morally "loose" and unfeminine in its liberties. We see neither of these as, in the end, attractive to her. She does idealize, however, a man throughout the story. What do we make of her, how shall we say, "obsession" with him?
Finally, think of the court as I described it in class - physically and narratively. How is it a space into which action, agency, emotion is sucked? As a vacuum? It affords the illusion of contact or connection but also the absolute prohibition of it. You'll need to think a lot more, on your own, about the significant of the "red-haired man" to all of this. And, to conclude, which of our tropes of "other writers" resonate in this story - with the author and with her narrative creations?
Take a look at our Tumblr image for that day to see more, particularly the ways in which we connected Edna in The Awakening to Estrella in Under the Feet of Jesus to the narrator in McCullers's story.
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